Doctor in charge at the World Bank will have to revive the patient

In a plot from The West Wing, Jim Yong Kim will take lessons from fighting HIV-Aids and TB to running the financial institution

Jim Yong Kim, American nominee for the World Bank president, with US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden at the White House in March 2012. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

It was Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing come to life: the White House solving a dilemma with a dramatic move, plucking out an obscure but highly qualified candidate for a crucial post.

Or so it seemed when Barack Obama put forward Jim Yong Kim as the United States's nominee for president of the World Bank, the pre-eminent multilateral development agency. Kim is all but certain to be approved by the bank's executive board on Monday.

In any other year, the choice of a 52-year-old doctor who established innovative programmes to fight HIV-Aids and tuberculosis would have been applauded as progressive — especially as the bank's previous 11 presidents have all been white men.

The prospect of backing Okonjo-Iweala – a talented economist who rose to become a World Bank managing director – must have tantalised the White House. But political considerations force Obama to nominate a US citizen. Luckily, Kim also has a backstory that makes him stand out.

Kim was born in Seoul in 1959, in a South Korea ravaged by war. Like many others, Kim's family suffered greatly. His father fled from the north at the age of 17 and never saw his family again. Kim's mother was forced to march 200 miles to escape the advancing North Korean army, and lost her own mother.

"My family's experience has given me an unshakable optimism about what can happen to the poorest people. You can start from humble beginnings and horrible conflicts and go on to lead a life of dignity," Kim has said.

When Kim was five, his family emigrated to the US and settled in Iowa, where his father, Nhak Hee, taught dentistry. His mother, Oaksook, received a scholarship to study philosophy.

Kim thrived in the midwest, where he was quarterback on his school's American football team and became interested in politics.

At the age of 12, Kim was campaigning in support of George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam war underdog who won the Democratic nomination to run for president in 1972.

McGovern was demolished by Richard Nixon but Kim says he loved his brush with politics, and it left him wanting to go further. His father had other ideas, as Kim recounted in a 2006 interview.

"I remember the first time I came back from college at Brown University, we were driving in the car and my father, just making conversation, said: 'What do you think you want to study?' And I said, you know, I think I want to study philosophy – my mother was a philosopher.

"So he pulled the car over and said: 'When you finish your medical residency you can do anything you want.' I think all immigrant families understand this to an extent, that your parents want you to do something safe – to have a skill that no one can take away from you."

Harvard offered a joint degree in medicine and anthropology, allowing him to satisfy both aims, although he later admitted: "For me, going to medical school was not the one thing in the world I wanted to do."

Kim wrote his PhD thesis on South Korea's economic development. In a recent article in the Financial Times, Kim said: "I have seen how integration with the global economy can transform a poor country into one of the most dynamic and prosperous economies in the world."

But the difficulties of healthcare in the developing world were what first concerned him. At medical school he became friends with another student, Paul Farmer, and in 1987 they and others launched Partners in Health, a charity that fought tuberculosis, first in Haiti and later in other hard-to-reach places such as Siberian prisons.

That experience led to his appointment to the World Health Organisation, where he became director of the HIV-Aids department.

Kim's time at the WHO included his championing of an initiative that could be a template for his tenure at the World Bank: the "3 by 5" programme, aiming to bring treatment for HIV-Aids to three million people in the developing world by 2005.

It was criticised as over-ambitious but Kim piloted the programme deftly enough to bring it to fruition. Although the programme missed its 2005 deadline, the task was completed by 2007 and remains a highlight in the global struggle against HIV-Aids.

Kim's brief time at Dartmouth gives few pointers to how he will perform at the World Bank, although his administration has been criticised for failing to solve a long-running problem with student fraternity "hazing" or bullying.